In this video, researchers apply Microsoft Cognitive Search to find clues in newly released documents on the JFK assassination. “Late last year the US government released more than 34,000 pages related to the assassination of JFK. What if we could bring the full power of Microsoft’s AI to understand what was in those files and the vast scale of the Azure Cloud to handle the continual flow of data?”

Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Alces Flight to take advantage of the scalability, reliability and agility of Azure. With Alces Flight, it is possible for researchers to spin up any size of High-Performance Computing cluster in minutes, providing users with a fully-featured HPC environment that includes thousands of open source applications.

Over at the Microsoft Blog, Jason Zander writes that the company is acquiring Avere Systems. “By bringing together Avere’s storage expertise with the power of Microsoft’s cloud, customers will benefit from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience.”

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews their 2017 technology predictions from last year. After that, we do our 2018 Predictions including a bombshell on who Rich thinks will acquire Cray by the end of the year.

Today Cray announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure. Under the partnership agreement, Microsoft and Cray will jointly engage with customers to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale, seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud.

Jason Knight from Intel writes that the company has joined Microsoft, Facebook, and others to participate in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) project. “By joining the project, we plan to further expand the choices developers have on top of frameworks powered by the Intel Nervana Graph library and deployment through our Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit. Developers should have the freedom to choose the best software and hardware to build their artificial intelligence model and not be locked into one solution based on a framework. Deep learning is better when developers can move models from framework to framework and use the best hardware platform for the job.”

Today, Intel announced that its AI technology is being used by Microsoft to power their new accelerated deep learning platform, called Project Brainwave. “Project Brainwave achieves a major leap forward in both performance and flexibility for cloud-based serving of deep learning models. We designed the system for real-time AI, which means the system processes requests as fast as it receives them, with ultra-low latency. Real-time AI is becoming increasingly important as cloud infrastructures process live data streams, whether they be search queries, videos, sensor streams, or interactions with users.”

In this video, you’ll learn how to start submitting deep neural network (DNN) training jobs in Azure by using Azure Batch to schedule the jobs to your GPU compute clusters. “Previously, few people had access to the computing power for these scenarios. With Azure Batch, that power is available to you when you need it.”

Today Microsoft announced it has acquired Cycle Computing, a software company focused on making cloud computing resources more readily available for HPC workloads. “Now supporting InfiniBand and accelerated GPU computing, Microsoft Azure looks to be a perfect home for Cycle Computing, which started its journey with software for aggregating compute resources at AWS. The company later added similar capabilities for Azure and Google Cloud.”

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According to Intel, its new 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family includes Intel Deep Learning Boost for AI deep learning inference acceleration, fresh features and support for Intel Octane DC (data center) persistent memory, and more. Learn more about the offerings in a new issue of Parallel Universe Magazine. [READ MORE…]